While it may have limited applications in our industry, Cole's Law is my preference; it just tastes better. Simply stated, Cole's Law is "Cabbage In = Cabbage Out", with a little special sauce and horseradish.

I'd also like to point out that once we hit the physics-based limit on feature scaling, we still have the third dimension to keep us busy for a while, as well as ever-larger chip sizes. The actual Moore's law isn't just about speed, nor feature size - it's about computing power available at the most economic price point, which means that bigger, cheaper chips, still count. Once we hit the physics-limit, the foundries that can hit that will eventually get paid off, and chip prices will decrease, giving us an increase of computing power at a given price point, and thus, giving a bit of new life to the observation for a few more years.

Failure to account for Moore's Law has resulted in a number of projects being prematurely cancelled. Just because a technology does not yield a cost-effective product today, does not mean that the same product won't be cost effective in 2-4 years. Maybe the product needs to be put on the back burner, but way too often I have seen the project to be killed, only to be resurrected by another company a few years later when the costs become attractive.

Moore's Law (Trend) is amazing. I have been in the Semiconductor Industry since 1982 and every five years or so (1987, 1993, 1998, 2003, etc. etc.)I hear someone predicting that it will no longer hold -- but it does -- decade after decade.

I completely agree with "iniewski". Nevertheless, I predict that when computer chips have shrunk to their physical limit and Moore's Law has clearly reached the end of the line, there will be headlines that a "law" has been violated or found invalid. In any case, the longevity of this trend has been remarkable - in part because nobody wants the trend to end on their watch so the R&D efforts are redoubled when the end of the law's reign seems to be coming. The consumers of electronic products are the winners.

No, there are actually four types of physical laws: Definitions (e.g. F=ma, which defines the concept of force), Empirical (which is strictly observational), and Theoretical (which embodies an understanding), and derived (which can be mathematically produced from other laws, e.g. torque). Derived laws stand and fall with the laws they are derived from. Theoretical laws apply wherever the understanding they are based on applies. Definitions are true no matter what; the question with definitions is not "are they true" but "are they relevant".